Updates from the UAA/APU Consortium Library Instruction and Research Services Department

Monthly Archives: October 2017

This year, the Great American Smokeout will be on November 16, 2017, when smokers across the country take part in the American Cancer Society’s annual event. The Smokeout began nationwide in 1977, so this year will be the 40th anniversary.

Take a look at these resources from the Library Catalog that encourage people to stop smoking and take an important step toward a healthier life.

Enroll in LS 101: Introduction to Academic Library Research during Spring ’18 and learn how to effectively locate, evaluate, and ethically use information. This class will be offered in person. Click here to find out more.

Occasionally, someone asks us at the Reference Desk to verify a quotation. It may be a commonly known phrase, something a famous person said, a proverb from another land, or something pretty (okay, terribly!) obscure. What to do? Google, right! But hold onto your Googs; if you try Google, you’ll often find that the exact same quote – whether correct or not – ping-pongs and pinballs and pachinkos its way from blog to website to Facebook to Pinterest and back to blog ad infinitum with no authoritative source to ground it until nobody really knows whether the quote is accurate, where it originally came from, or whether it’s coming or going. Of course, that might not matter if you share the philosophy of the Bandar-Log Monkeys in the chapter on Kaa’s Hunting in the first book of Kipling’s The Jungle Book:

We all say so, and so it must be true….

But we rely on accuracy rather than popularity here, and having to plow through an endless number of parroting web pages just makes it all the harder to verify the authentic text and its original source. That’s why we have what you might call the Un-Google: a good half dozen or so shelves of quotation books and related dictionaries and sources in the Reference Collection in the P6000’s. It requires patience, sure, and it’s far from perfect — finding an accurate quote with a confirmed provenance can be a very lengthy and difficult affair, especially when the quotation is inaccurately or only partially remembered — but at least when you find one, the source is usually given.

There are general quotation compilations, such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, as well as ones on very specific subjects. (Throwing Monkeys at the Coconuts, for instance, is a collection of travel quotations, although that’s one we don’t have.) And the indexing of quotes inside the book will vary: some will be indexed by author, some by date or theme, some by the first line of the quote, and others might be by language or country. Here are a few examples from several quotation books and specialized dictionaries in this part of the Reference Collection:

REF PN6080 .C57 2001The Concise Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (p. 113)
Si nous n’avions point de défauts, nous ne prendrions pas tant de plaisir à en remarquer dans les autres.
(If we had no failings, we would not be so pleased to notice them in others.)
(La Rochefoucauld: Reflexions)

REF PN 6084 .W6 B47 1996Women’s Words: The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women (p. 251)
… people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are.
(George Eliot, Middlemarch, chapter 72)

REF PN 6371 .D65 1996I Love Me, Vol. INow, this title sounds rather like a multi-volume ode to narcissism, doesn’t it? Anyone you know? Can’t wait for Vol. II to come out? Then try reading it backwards: it’s a dictionary of palindromes! Many entries are rather forced – after all, palindromes are difficult! – but some are rather charming (p.231):
Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron

Nor are palindromes restricted to English (p. 219.):
Nisumaa oli isasi ilo aamusin
(Finnish: The field of wheat was your father’s joy in the morning)

Hmm, I think I’ll let you figure out what that one means! There are full word palindromes, too, not just letter-by-letter ones (p. 139):
Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.

And for those who don’t care for Hawaiian music (p. 250):
Oh, no! Don Ho!

But if someone comes up and tells you this practically cliché palindrome: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!” you can offer the perfect rejoinder given on p.227: “No, it’s a banana bastion.”

Sometimes, everyone knows the quotation and who said it – except when that’s not the case. Like what? Well, like this popular and insightful quotation from Petronius Arbiter in about 210 B.C.:
We trained hard – but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

But there’s no note of who translated it into English – or did it even need to be translated? Did Petronius even write it? Jim Reeds looked into it and noted that Petronius Arbiter was alive in Nero’s reign over 200 years later – a rather Biblical lifespan! Beyond that, Reeds couldn’t find any citing of the quotation before 1945 or so (and that’s A.D., mind you, not B.C.!). But what about the provenance of this revisionist information, much less the quotation itself? I’ve seen the relevant web page myself, but All Things Must Pass (à la George Harrison’s album title), and so has that web page! Fortunately, the Wayback Machine (www.waybackmachine.org) can come to the rescue, so here’s a preserved version of the page:http://web.archive.org/web/20050404005706/http://www.dtc.umn.edu:80/~reedsj/petronius.html
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There are plenty of variants and translations given in the beginning, so you’ll need to scroll down a bit to get to the source information about the quotation.

Next week, the library’s display table (near the main circulation desk) will feature information on student and personal finance. Along with books and pamphlets, you’ll find posters with information about investing, fraud, saving for retirement, and more. These posters are part of an educational program called DASH for the STASH. Read the posters and answer questions for a chance to win a $1,000 contribution to an IRA. The posters will be available October 8-15, 2017.

UAA’s Office of Financial Aid hosts workshops throughout the year to help students take charge of their finances. Here are links to their calendars for workshops focused on personal finance and financial aid.